◬ - RVA Eviction Lab
◍ - UVa Equity Center
Last revised: 2021-09-09
Below, we provide some preliminary representations of eviction filings and judgments in Virginia General District Courts for the Richmond and Charlottesville regions, alongside additional characteristics of the locality or ZIP Code in which the court filings occurred. Building off of the work of the RVA Eviction Lab, we are seeking to make a set of eviction and housing justice data readily available in online and interactive formats. This initial presentation is intended (1) to provide a sense of the currently available data and (2) to spark ideas about what information and data would be most useful to include—and in what forms (visual distributions, relations, tables, etc.) and with what capabilities (searching, sorting, selecting, etc.) that material should be presented.
The table and visualizations that follow reflect eviction (unlawful detainer) cases filed against residential defendants in the Richmond and Charlottesville regions between 2018 and Q1 2021. For the purposes of this document, the Richmond region comprises Chesterfield County, Henrico County, Hopewell City, Petersburg City, and Richmond City; the Charlottesville region comprises Albemarle County, Charlottesville City, Fluvanna County, Greene County, Louisa County, and Nelson County. (These regional compositions are not unchangeable.)
We begin with raw case data scraped from general district court websites, and we apply a series of cleaning procedures to the data before analysis. Those procedures are described in detail in the drop-down at the bottom of this document. There are a few cleaning procedures that all people viewing these data should be aware of:
Eviction Rate: Annual eviction rate based on currently available data for each year, # plaintiff judgments / # renting households.Cases: Number of unlawful detainer cases filed against residential defendants
Plaintiff Judgments: Number of cases ruled in favor of the plaintiff, resulting in an evictionDefault Judgments: Number of cases ruled in favor of the plaintiff, resulting in an eviction, after a defendant fails to appearRental Prop.: The proportion of households in a spatial unit that are renting (ACS Table B25003)Rentals: The number of households in a spatial unit that are renting (ACS Table B25003)Median Rent: Median gross rent paid among renting households in a spatial unit (ACS Table B25064)Median HH Income: Median household income among all households in a spatial unit (ACS Table B19013)Total Pop.: Total population within a spatial unit (ACS Table B02001)% POC: Percent of population within a spatial unit who identify as people of color (Black or African American, Hispanic, Asian, American Indian or Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, Multiracial; ACS Table B02001)